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Review Essays of Academic, Professional &
Technical Books in the Humanities &
Sciences

The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss (New World
Library) Evolution, Science, Religion, Literature, War, Politics,
Medicine, and Survival — How Dreams Drive the Human Adventure

What do the first major oil discovery in Kuwait, Mark Twain’s
fiction, and Harriet Tubman’s success conducting slaves to freedom
via the Underground Railroad have in common? They were all
experienced first in dreams.

Dreaming is vital to the human story. It is essential to our
survival and evolution, to creative endeavors in every field, and,
quite simplyto getting us through our daily lives. All of us dream.
Now Robert Moss shows us how our dreams shape world events and why
deepening our conscious engagement with dreaming is crucial for our
future. He traces the strands of dreams through archival records and
well-known writings, weaving remarkable yet true accounts of
historical figures who were influenced by their dreams.

In this wide-ranging, visionary book, Moss creates a new way to
explore history and consciousness, combining the storytelling skills
of a bestselling novelist with the research acumen of a scholar of
ancient history and the personal experience of an active dreamer.
With eloquent prose, Moss describes beautiful Lucrecia de León,
whose dreams were prized by powerful men in Madrid and then recorded
during the Spanish Inquisition, as well as the fascinating dream
correspondence between Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli. Building on the
foundation of decades of original scholarship, Moss explores the
past yet also reveals lessons that can help us create a better
future. The Secret History of Dreaming addresses the central
importance of dreams and imagination as secret engines in the
history of all things human, from literature to quantum physics,
from religion to psychology, from war to healing.

You are a former history professor and
you say that to research and write this book you had to become a
"dream archeologist". What is "dream archeology" and what skills and
resources are required to practice it?

While "archeology" is often understood to be the science of
unearthing and studying antiquities, the root meaning is more
profound: it is the study of the arche, the first and essential
things. The practice of "dream archeology" requires mastery of a
panoply of sources, and the ability to read between the lines and
make connections that have gone unnoticed by specialists who were
looking for something else. It requires the ability to locate
dreaming in its context - physical, social and cultural. And it
demands the ability to enter a different time or culture, through
the exercise of active imagination, and experience it from the
inside as it may have been. These are the skills we need to excavate
the inner dimension of the human adventure.

What is the most important thing you
can tell us about your new book, The Secret History of Dreaming?

The Secret History of Dreaming restores a missing dimension to
our understanding of what drives the human adventure: the vital role
of dreams and imagination in science and literature, war and
religion, medicine and the survival of our kind. History without the
inner side is as shallow as history without economics, and as boring
as history without sex.

This is not another book about dreams. It is a history of
dreaming, a term I use in an expansive sense to encompass not only
night dreams but also waking visions, the interplay of mind and
matter that is sometimes called synchronicity, and experiences in a
creative "solution state".

Explain your statement that a dream
led directly to one of the biggest oil discoveries in world history.

In 1937, Colonel Harold Dickson, the former British Political
Agent in Kuwait, dreamed that a sandstorm opened a crater under a
strange tree in the desert, and revealed a mummy that came to life
as a beautiful woman who gave him an ancient coin. His wife recorded
the dream for him in the middle of the night, and then he consulted
a Bedouin woman dream interpreter who gave him the location of the
tree in his dream — in the Burqan hills — and told him he would find
great treasure there. He was able to persuaded the Kuwait Oil
Company (which had been drilling dry holes up to this point) and
they struck it rich at the exact place he had dreamed. This was the
origin of Kuwait's oil wealth and a major source for the Allies in
World War II.

Tell us about the dreams of the
Founding Fathers

John Adams and Dr Benjamin Rush — who made a close study of
precognitive dreams — were in the habit of exchanging dreams in
their extensive correspondence. In 1809, Rush wrote to Adams about a
dream in which the doctor's son read him a page from the future
history of the United States. The dream letter described "the
renewal of friendship" between Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who had
been estranged for many years because of their political
disagreements. It stated that the later correspondence of the two
former presidents would inspire many. And it recorded that Adams and
Jefferson "sunk into the grave nearly at the same time." Nearly
seventeen years later, long after their reconciliation, the two
former presidents died on the same day — July 4, 1826. The
predictions on the page of Dr Rush's dream history were exactly
fulfilled.

Explain how Harriet Tubman's dreams
and visions helped her to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the
Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman is an iconic figure in American history — the
runaway slave from Maryland's Eastern Shore who went back to the
South, braving great dangers, to free her fellow-slaves and became
the most successful "conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Yet the
secret of Harriet Tubman's achievement has rarely been told. She was
a dreamer and a seer. In her dreams and visions, she could fly like
a bird. Her gift may have been associated with a near-death
experience in her childhood, when an angry overseer threw a
two-pound lead weight that laid open her skull. We learn from her
how great gifts can spring from our wounds. Harriet herself said she
inherited special gifts — including the ability to travel outside
the body and to visit the future — from her father, who "could
always predict the future" In The Secret History of Dreaming, I
examine the evidence that her ancestors were Ashanti, and that she
may have inherited something of the Ashanti experience of dream
tracking. I also look at the influence of the first, fiercely brave
and inspiring, itinerant black women preachers, whose example may
have helped Harriet develop the power to transfer her vision. She
could sing courage into people's hearts.

Tell us how Freud, tragically, may
have missed an early dream diagnosis of the mouth cancer that killed
him many years later.

The most famous of all the dreams Freud analyzed was one of his
own, the Irma Dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams he gives a
lengthy account of this 1895 dream and his work with it. In the
dream, he inspects the mouth of a patient called Irma and discusses
her condition with several doctors. The tragic irony is that in all
his work on this dream, Freud may have missed a health warning that
could have saved his life. I report on the exhaustive work of a
cancer surgeon who compared Freud's medical records with his dream
report and concluded that the contained an amazingly exact preview
of precise symptoms of the oral cancer that killed Freud 28 years
later.

You write: "Because young Sam Clemens
could not find Brazil, he failed to become the first cocaine dealer
in North America and instead became Mark Twain." Tell us that story!

While he was working as a printer in Keokuk, Iowa, young Sam
Clemens read a book that described "a vegetable product with
miraculous powers" that was growing in Brazil. Sam was "fired with a
longing" to go up the Amazon, secure a supply of this miracle plant
— and make a fortune. He sailed to New Orleans on a riverboat whose
pilot was the celebrated Horace Bixby.

When he got to New Orleans, Sam found that no ship in port was
sailing for Brazil and no one could tell him how to get there. So he
changed his plans, sought out Bixby, and persuaded him to take him
on as an apprentice pilot. Working on the Mississippi river, he got
many of the ideas for the books that made him famous under a
pen-name borrowed from the boatmen's cry "Mark Twain", meaning two
fathoms, safe water.

The miracle plant Sam had set out to find was coca. Had he
succeeded in his original plan, Keokuk, Iowa would have become the
cocaine capital of America. Because Sam Clemens couldn't find
Brazil, he failed to become the first cocaine dealer in North
American history and instead became Mark Twain.

Tell us about the mystery of the
Chinese Woman in Wolfgang Pauli's dreams that Jung could not figure
out.

The quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli frequently dreamed of an
alluring "Chinese woman" who moved like a snake dancer. Though he
found her sexy, she sometimes appeared in situations that filled him
with dread, as if his world was being shaken. He was also distressed
by a dream in which the Chinese woman had a baby the world would not
acknowledge. Paul discussed these dreams with Jung, and Jung talked
of archetypes and the anima. Then Pauli's "Chinese woman" stepped
out of his dream life and into the world at the center of the
so-called "Chinese revolution" in physics. A woman physicist, Dr Wu,
conducted the critical experiments that overthrew one of the
scientific paradigms (the parity principle) that Pauli had fiercely
upheld, shaking his intellectual universe. Yet when a Nobel prize
was awarded for this breakthrough in 1957, only the two theoretical
physicists — both men — were recognized; the Chinese woman's baby
went unacknowledged by the world.

I explore this episode in my investigation of the rich 25-year
correspondence between Jung and Pauli. They were giants in their
respective fields — depth psychology and physics — who goaded each
other, in a 25-year intellectual friendship, to step beyond the
boundaries of their disciplines and seek to develop a working model
of a universe in which mind and matter are constantly interweaving.
But they were capable of missing dream clues!

Tell us about the woman you call "the
beautiful dream spy of Madrid".

Ah, the lovely Lucretia de León! When she was a guest of the
Spanish Inquisition, one of the investigators told her, "You are so
beautiful a dead man would rise up and make you pregnant." Since
women are absent from so much of the history written by men, it is
remarkable that —thanks in part to the Spanish Inquisition — the
record of no fewer than 415 dreams of a young woman of Madrid have
survived from the time of the Spanish Armada. They were transcribed
between 1587 and 1590, by clerics who listened to her accounts of
her night adventures while an armed courier waited in the street
ready to gallop to the holy city of Toledo to carry the latest dream
installment to the head of the powerful Mendoza clan, second only to
the Habsburgs in Spain. The reason Lucrecia's dreams were so prized
was that she had a gift for seeing the future and discovering what
was going on behind closed doors, in the royal palace or the house
of Sir Francis Drake in England. Her dreams were exploited as
sources of military intelligence and as political propaganda, in a
time when dream visions were still greatly respected. Some of them
were painted; others were performed as theatre for high society in
the town house of a dowager duchess who may also have been an
English agent. Lucrecia's story is a fascinating chapter in the
history of women as well as the history of dreaming.

You are the creator of an original
approach to dreamwork and healing that you call Active Dreaming.
What is Active Dreaming? Will you give us examples of original
techniques you have developed, and tell us how they differ from
other approaches to dream interpretation or analysis?

Active Dreaming is founded on the understanding that dreaming
isn't`just what happens during sleep; dreaming is waking up to
sources of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the
everyday mind.

One of the most important original techniques I have introduced
is the Lightning Dreamwork Game, a fast and fun way to share inner
experiences, get helpful feedback and guidance for action that you
can practice with just about anyone, almost anywhere, It's a great
inner workout, and when you play it with friends or family or
workmates, you'll find you are deepening and energizing your
relationships. By simply playing the game, you'll find you can
recognize and work with diagnostic and precognitive elements in
dreams, and harvest personal imagery for healing and creative
projects.

I teach many techniques for conscious dream travel. This goes far
beyond what "lucid dreaming" is commonly thought to be. We learn to
start out lucid and stay lucid. Using shamanic techniques for
shifting consciousness, we embark on intentional journeys — often
with partners or a whole group — on agreed itineraries, which might
take us on a mission to scout out the possible future, or explore an
alternate reality or a location in the imaginal realm, or through
the doorway of a previous dream or vision. We learn to travel back
inside dreams to dialogue with dream characters, resolve nightmare
terrors, bring through healing and guidance, and scout out the
possible future.

I love leading games of coincidence and imagination, and am
constantly dreaming up new ones. Active dreamers find that the world
around us will speak to us in the manner of dreams if we will only
pay attention. I teach people how to navigate by synchionicity, how
to harvest personal imagery for healing, and how to grow a vision so
deep and strong that it wants to take root in the world.

About the Author

Robert Moss was born in Australia,
and his fascination with the dreamworld began in his childhood, when
he had three near-death experiences and first learned the ways of a
traditional dreaming people through his friendship with Aborigines.
A former professor of ancient history, he is also a novelist,
journalist, and independent scholar. Visit him online at
www.mossdreams.com.

Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by
Michael Uebel (The New Middle Ages: Palgrave Macmillan)
studies the manner in which medieval ways of knowing the Oriental "other" were
constructed around the idea of a utopic East as located in the legend and Letter
of Prester John (c. 1160). The birth of utopic thinking, it argues, is tied to
an understanding of alterity having as much to do with the ways the medieval
West understood itself as the manner in which the foreign was mapped. Drawing
upon the insights of cultural studies, film studies, and psychoanalysis, this
book rethinks the contours of the known and the unknown in the medieval period.
It demonstrates how the idea of otherness intersected in intricate ways with
other categories of difference (spatial, gender, and religious). Scholars in the
fields of history as well as literary and religious studies will be interested
in the manner in which the book considers the formal dimensions of how histories
of the Oriental "other" were written and lived.
More

Teach Me Dreamsby Mechal Sobel (Princeton University Press) One day in
1698, Robert Pyle of Pennsylvania decided to buy a black slave. The next night
he dreamed of a steep ladder to heaven that he felt he could not climb because
he carried a black pot. In the dream, a man told him the ladder was the light of
Jesus Christ and would bear any whose faith held strong; otherwise, the climber
would fall. Pyle woke that morning positive that he should eschew slaves and
slavery, having equated the pot with the slave he wished to buy. In fact, so
acutely did this dream awaken him to his sins that he became a dynamic advocate
of liberation. This dream literally changed his outlook and his life.

The theme of this study is encapsulated in the startling
cover illustration; an 18th-century folk painting of a white Virginian embracing
a black woman while another thrashes a black man with a stick. Mechal Sobel,
history professor at the University of Haifa, analyzes 200 letters, diaries, and
autobiographies from the America of 1740 to 1840, more than half of which
describe dreams and visions. Observing, "Today the acceptance of an inner
consciousness of self is so widely taken for granted that it is hard to realize
how modern this development is," Sobel sees in the dreams a progression from
passive to active, and he places the awakening of individual self-awareness
during this period. The impetus for this development she attributes to
"opposition to an enemy other." Blacks and whites regarded each other as alien,
the "enemy other," a concept reinforced by friction between men and women as
they struggled with rigid gender expectations. The raw sociological material
given is fascinating, the background well drawn, the statistics enlightening:
for example, of the 2.6 million population of the Colonies in 1774, half a
million were black. The material is viewed through a narrow lens, however, with
all social conflicts given either a racial or gender-oriented interpretation.
Dreams are prominent in the native cultures of the Americas, Africa, and
Australia. One of the contributions of this study is the recognition that
Anglo-Americans also turned to them for an understanding of their lives.

Teach Me Dreamsdelves into the dream world of ordinary Americans and
finds that as their self-perception increased, transforming them on a personal
level, so did a revolutionary spirit that wrought momentous political changes.
Mechal Sobel considers dreams recorded in the life narratives of 100 people,
revealing the America of the Revolutionary Era to have been a truly
dream-infused culture in which analysis of dreams was encouraged, and subsequent
personal reevaluation was striking. Sobel uses a wealth of information--letters,
diaries, and over 200 published autobiographies from a wide range of "ordinary"
people; black, white, male, female. In these accounts, many previously neglected
by historians, dreamers explain how their nighttime adventures opened their eyes
to aspects of themselves, or unveiled new paths they should take both personally
and politically. Such paths often led them to challenge those in power.

Charting the widely dreamed of opposition between blacks and whites,
men and women, Sobel offers astounding new insights into how early
Americans understood their lives. Her analysis of the dreams and
lives of ordinary Revolutionary-Era people demonstrates links
between dreaming, self-reevaluation, and participation in the
radically changing politics of the time.
Teach Me Dreamsis an original and valuable addition to the
rich literature on both history and dream analysis and shouldappeal to specialists in the fields of American and African-American
history, and anyone interested in dreams and self-development.